David Filner assumed the administrative leadership of the San Antonio Symphony in November, 2012. Led by Music Director Sebastian Lang-Lessing, the San Antonio Symphony is celebrating its 73rd year this season.

Note: This is an mySA.com City Brights Blog. These blogs are not written or edited by mySA or the San Antonio Express-News. The authors are solely responsible for the content.

Future of Classical recording

Many pundits have already announced the death of recorded music. For years, rock bands toured to help promote their recordings (first LPs and then CDs.) The tours lost money, but they made enough on sales of recordings to make the tour worth while. Since the invention of downloading (with iTunes and others) the sales of recordings have plummeted. Now, rock bands sell CDs at a loss, in order to promote their profitable tours! We have come full circle in just a few years.

Anne Midgette in the Washington Post (click here for full blog) just interviewed the CEO and Founder of Naxos, Klaus Heyman. Naxos has confounded the experts and continued to grow its sales of classical recordings. Heyman reports that sales are up 6% this year. But even Heyman admits that sales of physical recordings will not continue in the future. What surprised me in this interview is that Heyman suggests downloading is also a dead-end. He believes the future is in online subscription services, like Naxos’ web subscription and its higher end Naxos Music Library.

I’m been a subscriber to www.naxos.com for several years and it is fabulous. For only $19.95 per year, you get access to thousands of classical recordings from Naxos’ catalog. You don’t download them; you only listen online. The Naxos Music Library (at a cost of $150.00 a year) gets you access to more than 44,000 cds!

I use my subscription to inexpensive naxos.com for a very specific purpose. As the CEO of the Symphony, I’m constantly talking to patrons or musicians who recommend music to me. I can’t afford (and don’t have the time) to buy all the recommendations, but I want to hear them (at least once.) So, I log-on to Naxos and in just seconds I can listen to almost anything. Probably most readers don’t have the need to hear as many different classical compositions as I do, but it is still a handy tool. Maybe someday I’ll run out of music and need to subscribe to the larger database, but I doubt it.

If you haven’t visited www.naxos.com, I highly recommend it. After a few visits, you might even want to discard your CDs and your iPod.